Continental has signed a membership agreement with the University of California, Berkeley’s AI research group DeepDrive.

Together, they will continue research into artificial intelligence (AI) in road vehicles, an important part of AVs.

“We are joining forces with the world’s leading AI researchers,” said Demetrio Aiello, head of Continental’s corporate AI and robotics lab.

“Building on the momentum of our strategic partnerships with the University of Oxford, DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) and other AI thought leaders, we have signed a five-year agreement to be members of the UC Berkeley DeepDrive (BDD) centre.”

The research focuses on optimising the speed of neural networks, protecting AI systems in safety-critical applications and improving machine vision and learning.

In the first year of the membership, Continental and BDD will work on two areas in particular. The first is the development of efficient testing methods that will ensure the reliability of AI. The second area is the optimisation of memory usage of AI. This would allow easier implementation of AI methods in vehicles.

“What inspired us most to team up with the experts in Silicon Valley and UC Berkeley was the highly interesting research in the field of explainable AI as well as the optimisation of deep neural networks that were taking place there,” said Aiello.

Explainable AI focuses on understanding precisely how an AI system makes decisions. To test artificial intelligence in detail, developers must know exactly how it works.